Suresh Menon: A cracker of a Diwali

If you lived in both north and south India when you were a child, things could get a bit confusing. It was, for instance, Diwali in the north and Deepavali in the south. Growing up, family, friends, and neighbours celebrated the festival of light but I personally was far from being ept. For one, I could never figure out which end of the sparkler to hold, and there is nothing that brings a three-year-old closer to asking the great cosmic questions than finding he has once again got it wrong. The heat didn’t cause as much pain as the mirth, while the above-mentioned family etc roared in laughter.

The trauma of those early years meant that I tended to follow the excellent example of the family dog – a handsome fellow named Caesar – and hide under the bed when it was that time of the year again. I hated the boom of the crackers, the indeterminate flight path of the rockets and the friendly way some of these were thrown at you while you tried to slink away. Television wasn’t an option, for it hadn’t yet been invented – well, I exaggerate, but it hadn’t got around to visiting our small community.

The one thing I loved was the flower pot – the little pyramid that sparkled and spewed out its multicoloured flares and lit up everything in the vicinity including your cousin trying to get over-friendly with a neighbour behind a tree. But even these had limited appeal until one of them accidentally set fire to a particularly obnoxious neighbour and we spent the rest of that Diwali trying to recreate the scene ‘accidentally’.

Then suddenly things changed. I grew older, developed a rare medical condition called ‘reading addiction’ and managed to convince my father that I would rather he spent his Diwali budget on books for me than on stuff that crackled and burnt and disappeared overnight.

Literature saved me from the embarrassment of Diwali; my no-go rule was broken only once when, in an attempt to impress a girlfriend in high school, I attempted to send one of those rockety-thingies into outer space and it ended up nearly blowing up her father’s car. That ended the romance.

I am grateful that celebrating Diwali led to two important developments in my life. It ensured I became a voracious reader, and it saved me from marrying the wrong person.

Thus every year at Diwali (or Deepavali), I send up a prayer to the gentleman who slew the demon and ensured the triumph of good over evil. I don’t hide under the bed any more. And after dodging the crackers and rockets, I light a flower pot. Freud would have understood.